British police assisted in capturing a submarine transporting 6.5 tonnes of cocaine to Europe, marking one of the largest drug busts of its kind.
The vessel had departed from Brazil when it was captured by Portuguese police in the Atlantic Ocean, 500 nautical miles south of the Azores Islands.
Five crew members from Brazil, Colombia, and Spain were arrested and transferred to the Portuguese island of São Miguel.
Officials stated that the submarine contained £530 million worth of cocaine.
A Portuguese newspaper reported that it was one of the largest semi-submersibles ever built to transport the drug from South America to Europe.
“The traffickers planned to collect the drugs near the coast using high-speed vessels and smuggle them ashore,” stated Spain’s Guardia Civil.
Spanish authorities, who alerted the Portuguese, noted it was the first time a drug-running semi-submersible had been intercepted in the open sea.
“The transatlantic movement of semi-submersibles is increasingly frequent, with several cases in recent years,” Spain’s Guardia Civil said.
“These types of vessels are difficult to detect and often carry a large amount of cocaine… the crew can easily sink them if caught, making it more difficult to recover the drugs as evidence of the crime.”
Europe is the largest cocaine market after the US, with hundreds of homemade submarines being launched to the continent since the practice began two decades ago.
In 2019, the discovery of a submarine carrying 3.3 tonnes of cocaine off the coast of Spain was described by police as the first “narco-submarine” to be intercepted in Europe.
The latest bust, dubbed Operation Nautilus, also involved the Portuguese Air Force, the UK’s National Crime Agency, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Lisbon-based Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, of which Britain is a part.
Cocaine was one of the first effective local anaesthetics, and ophthalmology (eye surgery and treatment) was one of the first medical fields to adopt it widely.
Cocaine in Eye Treatments
In the 1880s, doctors discovered that cocaine could numb the surface of the eye without affecting its function — a huge breakthrough.
In 1884, Viennese ophthalmologist Karl Koller famously used a cocaine solution to perform eye surgery without general anaesthesia.
This allowed for precise operations and was much safer than previous methods, often involving ether, chloroform, or nothing.
Cocaine became standard in eye surgeries for a time — not just to numb the eye, but to reduce bleeding and irritation.
Sigmund Freud (yes, that Freud) was a big proponent of cocaine’s medical uses, including for mood elevation and nerve disorders. But Karl Koller, Freud’s colleague, applied it to ophthalmology and changed surgery forever.
Eventually, due to addiction issues and the development of safer alternatives (like procaine, aka Novocaine), cocaine fell out of favor medically — but its role in eye care was a significant part of its early reputation as a “miracle drug.”
Want to see what other weird things doctors used before modern anaesthetics?
